As an alliance of the desperate, this one takes some beating. The Greatest Living Briton (Sir Timothy Berners Lee) has been thrown £30m of taxpayers' money for a new institute to research "web science".
Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web - how "data" would replace files, with machine …

According to wikipedia....

so how about we spend the cash on something more profitable - like transport infrastructure, medicine or anything but this.

Blast! - I've figured it all out. This money will obviously generate higher efficiency in the public services so Brown can say he's saved the nation without cuts or job losses. It's all so obvious now - he's a goner in a few weeks, shut the door too on the way out, Gordon

Falklands 2

Ding, correct answer!

Huh ?

"moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information", erm, which will be stored in files and presented as documents until we fundamentally re engineer our OS architecture and UI metaphors.

Or of course think up new and stupid names for them, but surely no government struggling with a massive debt burden would spunk 30 Mquids on such a ... oh.

You mean you resent the tone

Not that the article is recent. However, I also find it over the edge. I like the skeptical eye that the Register casts over the news, but this article is more like a black eye for the Register itself. All I can imagine is that the author once fancied himself to be some sort of innovator or researcher, but he couldn't get any funding.

I'm not sure what the value of the Web is, and I even agree on the negative value of the spam, but all in all, the article was poorly reasoned and uncalled for--and boring. Did I miss the joke somewhere?

(Icon is a bit stronger than my negative feelings. I'm not deleting my bookmark for the Register, but if I had one for this author, I'd certainly delete that. We can rank comments up or down, but I'd certainly rank this author down if I had that option.)

Out with the Truth .......

"... and thus opening up the possibility of by-passing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information."

:-) That's rich coming from a politician, who spend all of their time on media avoiding direct answers to direct requests for data and information..... aka questions.

"Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web - how "data" would replace files, with machine speaking unto machine in a cybernetic paradise." ....... Sounds just like AI @ ITs Work, which is Very Astutely Advanced in C42 Quantum Control Systems. And it was even recently available for 25.9259233333% of £30,000,000, although for the SMARTer Virtual Machine speaking unto Virtual Machine with CyberIntelAIgently Secured Magical Mystery Turing ProgramMING Modules does IT require an 8 figure 8 figured Sum Investment, which would then have £30m covering only 33.75% of the Program Costs, but Either and Both are still Intelligently Designed to Generate Wealth and not simply deplete the Public Purse, which appears to be the Knack Lost in Labour Government. ......... which so easily Spends Other Peoples Monies but Singularly Fails Spectacularly to Make Money and then Resorts in Desperation to Printing Paper which further devalues Worth whilst also Exposing as it does, and IT and Media do, the Systemic Crass Incompetence of Financial Fools Masquerading in Drab Grey Drag as Saviour Wizards.

Meanwhile ...

Meanwhile ... those who really know how to turn a mass of disorgnised information into something useful will just get on with the job. Most obviously Google. But in the UK, our own Autonomy also seems to making a considerable success in a non-web-centric world.

Fortunately for them, government's track record supports laughing off any new competition it might sponsor.

"Meanwhile ... those who really know how to turn a mass of disorgnised information into something useful will just get on with the job." ..... Nick Kew Posted Monday 22nd March 2010 15:58 GMT

How so very true, Nick Kew, for why would they waste their time and effort on serial losers. And there will be riches galore shortly for this is steaming down the tracks and heading straight for the buffers ........ http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2104-How-Far-Down-The-Rabbit-Hole-Must-We-Go.html

It is such a shame that dodgy Governments don't have an Equivalence of one of those CERN LHC "beam dump cores" ..... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/lhc_3_point_5_tev/page2.html .... for runaway out of control policies.

Ask a great dead Briton what the Web is instead...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. --Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

taking the science out of science

Nigel Shadbolt says, "The Institute for Web Science will act as a bridge between research and business". I found their publication, "Trip Reports from WebSci'09" particularly helpful in this respect.

For me, the Semantic Web is one of those phenomena that seeks to create order out of chaos, but ends up being subverted into an ideal to which all suitors fail. Believe me, people, we'll all suffer for it (it's in Revelations).

The author is a politician?

Really? Is the author a politician? I thought we Americans had all the biggest political dicks on our side of the pond. I'm burning with envy. Or burning because I can't burn him by voting against him?

Timbl's semantic web will be ideal

for the (near) future policy based radio services. My nexus 1 has user replaceable firmware - in a telephone!, if the cognitive or local policy driven 'white space' can get around to updating part of that firmware over the air - today you're in Amsterdam so an LTE VOIP call on 900MHz will cost you 1euro whilst joining the fray on the open 2.4GHz 802.11n will be free - but have a bit-error-rate of 1x10^5. Choice, following local laws.

Tomorrow in NY the "phone" will have to reconfigure itself to CDMA, or download the new Apple widget which allows data transit on the AppleTube? Rules:Encryption is allowed and you should avoid all domains ending in .cx (could be a local policy update from the NY pilot channel hive)

Semantic is a label attached to the data, suggesting its relevance, authenticity, origin and other attributes. I'm sure that accurately OWL3 programmed spiders using post-Bayesian rules could categorize much of the existing data. labelling it 'mostly harmless', perhaps?. LOLCatz would be labelled/taxed & only available in short legal doses, in those countries that permit it.

The Web has a bit to go before it gives ubiquitous, always on, customer access. At the same time as critical virtual service delivery - mainly due to expensive real people being re-sized to server based. If today's cashpoint ATM's are switched off there may be food riots in some countries after 3 days; in 20yrs the WWW will be more important than that, I'd appreciate a LOT of research to get it to be a stable resilient semantic system for the mesh network radio topology, probably post IP protocols anyway. beta version in 2016???

At least they are trying something

Rather than this waste of time nonsense sheet.

Your ability to differentiate between people who are doing good work and trying their best and charlatans is highly indicative of your own personal capabilities; I suggest that the author of this article and the peanut gallery here all go and dig a hole in their gardens and lie in it until they have had quite enough (I would like to say much more florid things, but I realize the pointlessness and wickedness of loosing my temper).

WWW does not include SMTP

Some truths

that fact is he is completely right when talking about the civil service with technology where it is now with a few law changes and less people who've used a typewriter at work in their lifetime we could cut the amount of civil servents by about 40%, but what will they do with their time???

A lot of civil servants invent procedures and policies that keep them in a job, There's a woman I know who is a digital libarian! She organises files on a computer WTF 25k a year pissed away.

Most academics don't do anything special and there are way too much standards for the average man, woman or SME could care about so why have all the useless ones that so long to be established by the academics that the tech is out of date before the standard is complete.

hmm...

Respect is due to you for resurrecting the word boondoggle on these pages. However respect is not due for the way that you are dismissing this project out of hand. A lot of good could come from a smarter, more data-centric web, but it needs people to research ways of achieving that.

It's easy to write the project off as a failure before it has started and the fact that two billion pounds has already been squandered on failed IT projects since 2000 doesn't exactly bode well. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/05/computing.egovernment)

But the web science initiative is being headed by people who *do* actually have a clue about what's going on. Regardless of whether Tim BL has been phished in the past, I'd still say he's done us all a favour by inventing the web and making it an open platform and I'd trust him to know how it can be developed further.

A smarter web is worth the investment

To be honest, I have to disagree with the author's view that the semantic web just provides standards that "no one will ever use"... On the contrary, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, the BBC and other big online movers and shakers have all developed software that uses them - it's not just limited to government IT departments in the UK or US!

It's interesting to me that the original web proposal was called "Information Management: A Proposal" - the Semantic Web seems to be all about improving information management on the web by introducing standards that can make it more machine-readable. This seems really valuable to me - it's nice having HTML for webmail clients and the Reg, but there's more value in having more markup that can describe facts about things on the web. So perhaps it's going to be an interesting new ground for AI and data management.

Admittedly, there are massive potential pitfalls. Different groups of people will want to use different terms to represent similar data. People will find new and inventive ways of injecting spam and noise into our daily lives. And Big Brother might have more of an interest in what we do on the web if our web-based data gives a better picture of who we are and what we are doing.

But in spite of that, I'd say it sounds really exciting because the web allows us to link data with potentially far more flexibility than your traditional relational database and web-based software can take off in new directions if it becomes easier to access web-based data.

The web has transformed people's lives massively over the past twenty years, so the web deserves to be studied as a subject in its own right. Why not invest in making the web more capable, when (in spite of the time wasted distractedly surfing) it's already proved to be so useful to so many people?

I'm no apologist for the government, but it seems that they've got the right idea in this case.